A group of homeless, under 25-year-old mothers made
headlines this week, occupying a boarded up council house in the Carpenters
estate in Newham, London. Under the slogan “social
housing not social cleansing”, Focus E15 Mothers drew attention to the commercial
redevelopment of social housing.

Members of the group had been staying at a specialist
hostel for homeless women before Newham Council sold it off to private
developers, who have turned the building into luxury flats. The council then
told the women they would not be rehoused in Newham, but would have to move as
far away as Manchester, Birmingham and Hastings. In Newham there are more than 24,000 households on the social housing waiting list.

The same thing is happening in other boroughs. Social
housing is being snatched from tenants and turned into expensive private
housing as local councils cash in on London's inflated property prices.

In Clapham, South London, a residential mews called
Rectory Gardens is being emptied one household at a time, in spite of the 20,000 people on the social housing waiting list in
Lambeth Borough. Henry - who has lived in the street since 1985, despite being
classed as a ‘short-life tenant’ - is among those waiting to be
rehoused. The council has offered priority rehousing to anyone who agrees to
leave Rectory Gardens, ahead of most of the people already waiting. In both Newham and Lambeth, tenants who refuse to accept the new
houses offered are classed as 'voluntarily homeless' and entitled to nothing.

When Henry leaves, Lambeth Council will almost
certainly pay Camelot, a ‘vacant property management’ company, to install short-term, live-in guardians. These property
guardians are ordinary people who pay to stay in disused buildings – councils use them to keep out squatters after social housing tenants
like Henry have been removed.

Henry doesn’t resent property guardians (after
all, it’s difficult to find affordable accommodation in London), but he can’t resist explaining to those already living in the
mews how harmful their presence is. As a result, one guardian has already
quit and moved away.

London councils are using property guardians as part of
the project to replace social housing tenants with affluent renters. Rectory
Gardens is typical. Take into account the level to which property prices in the
surrounding area have soared - a three-bed property in a gated development next
door sold for £979,000 in May - and it isn’t surprising that Lambeth Council
wants the houses back.

Lambeth has a unique problem with ‘short-life’
tenancies, which date back to the ‘60s and ‘70s, when the council fired out compulsory purchase orders as part
of a poorly budgeted town planning initiative. As part of the initiative,
Rectory Gardens was supposed to be demolished and turned into an old people’s home, but the council ran out of money before it reached the
street and many others. Not wanting to
be lumbered with empty, derelict houses the council let people who had moved
in, including squatters, stay on as ‘short-life tenants’. Many are still there forty years later.

Left alone, residents formed a housing cooperative with
an explicit self-help agenda - members shared skills, repaired each others
houses (Jane Wilson, who brought up two children on the street, remembers someone
learning to plaster ‘on the job’
on her house), and tamed the communal garden together.
While living in the mews Henry was able to go to University, train to be a
masseur and set up an art body in Clapham North. Those who were more able
supported those who were less so, making “a
conscious decision to give back to the community,” Henry
says. When occupants left, the houses were passed on to needy friends or
nominees. Where the council had failed to provide social housing, people did it
themselves.

Where incentivising settling hasn’t worked in Rectory Gardens, it’s
proved extremely difficult to move people who don’t want
to leave. But property guardian companies make it easy for councils to wait
while tenants exhaust themselves, financially and emotionally, fighting a
lengthy legal battle they are unlikely to win.

A London Student investigation that discussed the use of property guardians in clearing Anderson House, an ex-local authority
block in Tower Hamlets, found that property guardians tend to be young people
without a lot of money who - like the guardians Henry spoke to - are usually
naive to the harm they are causing and the extent to which they are being exploited.

Although Camelot advertise ‘fees’ (not rent) from £35 per week on their website, in
London it’s likely to be far more - £408.90
per month to live in a former care home in Hackney, for
example. Guardians fall through the gap between tenants and employees, which
means they have none of the rights of either: they can be told to leave at
extremely short notice, inspected and warned or fined if they are messy; they
can’t spend too many nights out and they can’t
bring guests round without booking them in.

Guardians placed in Rectory Gardens are lucky, most of
the houses have been lovingly restored over several decades, but Jane still
affectionately describes the street as ‘ramshackle’. Elsewhere guardians can expect far worse than ramshackle, with
Camelot boasting to speculative clients that their guardians are ‘flexible and adventurous’ and can live almost anywhere.

Camelot’s disregard for guardian welfare
has fuelled a movement against property guardian companies in the Netherlands,
where Camelot started in 1993. Abel Heijkamp, from the Dutch organisation Bond Precaire
Woonvormen, which campaigns against property guardian - or ‘anti-squat’
- organisations, believes companies like Camelot are “violating tenants’ rights on a massive scale,
resulting in a growing group of second class tenants”.

Margreet Brinxma, an ex-squatter from Utrecht, makes a
good point: property guardian companies are effectively using poor people
against themselves. By providing cheap but substandard accommodation, property guardian
companies are propping up an unsustainable rental system.

In London, Focus E15 Mothers have highlighted the issue
of 2000 allegedly habitable properties on the Carpenters Estate left
empty and rotting, until the council can say they are unliveable in and need
to be demolished. Margreet argues that squatting is a way “to
pressure real estate investors who would keep houses empty for speculation and
to remind the government of their duty of providing affordable houses”.

Property guardian companies are undermining squatting
as a political tool and a practical solution to housing crisis by patrolling
properties, recruiting would-be squatters and allegedly lobbying European
governments to legislate against it.

In Newham and in Lambeth, the local council has prised
out vulnerable social housing tenants and turned their homes into expensive
private housing. For groups like Focus E15 Mothers, and the Rectory Gardens
residents, it isn’t just homes
that are lost, but priceless support networks and social services too. By helping councils evict their own tenants
and making it more difficult to squat,
property guardian companies are facilitating social cleansing across London.

About the author

Charlotte England is a freelance journalist currently based in Myanmar. She has written for the Guardian, the Independent, Open Democracy, the LRB blog, and VICE.

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